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Facebook began with a simple thesis: Connect Friends. That was the sine qua non of its existence. From a simple thesis to an effective UI design, Facebook has grown over the years to become the third largest community in the world. But as of the last few years they have had to resort to generating revenue to meet shareholder expectations. Today it is noon at Facebook but there is the long shadow of darkness that I posit have fallen upon perhaps one of the most influential companies in history.

The fact is that leaping from connecting friends to managing the conversations allows Facebook to create this petri dish to understand social interactions at large scale eased by their fine technology platform. To that end, they are moving into alternative distribution channels to create broader reach into global audience and to gather deeper insights into the interaction templates of the participants. The possibilities are immense: in that, this platform can be a collaborative beachhead into discoveries, exploration, learning, education, social and environmental awareness and ultimately contribute to elevated human conscience. But it has faltered, perhaps the shareholders and the analysts are much to blame, on account of the fangled existence of market demands and it has become one global billboard for advertisers to promote their brands. Darkness at noon is the most appropriate metaphor to reflect Facebook as it is now.

Let us take a small turn to briefly look at some of other very influential companies that have not been as much derailed as has Facebook. The companies are Twitter, Google and LinkedIn. Each of them are the leaders in their category, and all of them have moved toward monetization schemes from their specific user base. Each of them has weighed in significantly in their respective categories to create movements that have or will affect the course of the future. We all know how Twitter has contributed to super-fast news feeds globally that have spontaneously generated mass coalescence around issues that make a difference; Google has been an effective tool to allow an average person to access information; and LinkedIn has created professional and collaborative environment in the professional space. Thus, all three of these companies, despite supplementing fully their appetite for revenue through advertising, have not compromised their quintessence for being. Now all of these companies can definitely move their artillery to encompass the trajectory of FB but that would be a steep hill to climb. Furthermore, these companies have an aura associated within their categories: attempts to move out of their category have been feeble at best, and in some instances, not successful. Facebook has a phenomenal chance of putting together what they have to create a communion of knowledge and wisdom. And no company exists in the market better suited to do that at this point.

One could counter that Facebook sticks to its original vision and that what we have today is indeed what Facebook had planned for all along since the beginning. I don’t disagree. My point of contention in this matter is that though is that Facebook has created this informal and awesome platform for conversations and communities among friends, it has glossed over the immense positive fallout that could occur as a result of these interactions. And that is the development and enhancement of knowledge, collaboration, cultural play, encourage a diversity of thought, philanthropy, crowd sourcing scientific and artistic breakthroughs, etc. In other words, the objective has been met for the most part. Thank you Mark! Now Facebook needs to usher in a renaissance in the courtyard. Facebook needs to find a way out of the advertising morass that has shed darkness over all the product extensions and launches that have taken place over the last 2 years: Facebook can force a point of inflection to quadruple its impact on the course of history and knowledge. And the revenue will follow!

Please support Jugglestars. This is an Alpha Release. Use the application in your organization. The Jugglestars team will be adding in more features over the next few months. Give them your feedback. They are an awesome team with great ideas. Please click on www.jugglestars.com and you can open an account, go to Account Settings and setup your profile and then you are pretty much ready to go to recognize your team and your colleagues at a project level.

Founded in 2012, JuggleStars provides professionals the ability to share and recognize success and broadcast recognition at varying levels of granularity across a wide array of social platforms. We enable the professionals to manage their brand and maintain and grow their digital portfolio of achievements. Our vision is to make all of the active professionals in our network become lighthouses in the global talent marketplace.

To that end, we believe that there are four tightly intertwined components in play to make this possible.

1. Rich User Experience: It is important for us to create a rich user experience to encourage users to use our application and reward their bosses, subordinates, peers and third-party vendors – all of the folk who make the life of the professional just a little easier and better. To that end, we have adopted some of the common social networking principles, user experience and general interactivity to allow quicker adoption and integration of users into the JuggleStars community. We will continue to hone and sharpen our focus, while being more inclined toward minimalism that advances the core value proposition to the user.

2. Tools: We will provide tools integrated into the rich user experience. Being bootstrapped has afforded us very little headroom to give you all that we think you would really find helpful, but our goal is to do our best to give you the tools to be able to manage your brand better. With your support and generosity, we can certainly accelerate what we can provide to you, and we hope that we can demonstrate the power of the web together to create a meaningful and impactful solution via a set of tools that will endure and stand the test of time.

3. Fun: We are a team that wants to introduce fun in the application. We have as a team worked together to integrate HR, Gaming, Recognition, Open Platform in a manner such that we introduce a healthy spirit of competition and fun while you use our application. Trust us! We are also trying to figure out ways in which you may not have to use our application. We have left you wondering now, haven’t we? Well, stay tuned.

4. Social Good: Great people do great things. They are the lighthouses for talent. They are the anchors in an organization. They fuel positivity and engagement and al’esprit de corps. They set the standards of excellence. They are the power brokers. They are the gateways that have achieved thresholds of excellence. They are the switch hitters; You can count on them to be the last ones standing. They face adversity with a smile. And most importantly, they are humble and they do not forget that they belong to a much larger community and they want to give back …if not for themselves, for the future generations. They are the lighthouses that look beyond the ocean and we are committed to provide tools to help them advance their aspirational and ideal motives that make a difference. We are with you all the way.

Social networking, as we understand it today, comprises three major elements:
A) Content
B) Participants
C) Activity

The cross product of all of the above three lends to the gravitas of the social network and its effective reach into many aspects of the daily routine of a user.
What has transpired over the last few years is the thought that social networks should be free. The fundamental presumption is that a free network would generate activity that would gain traction and sufficient critical mass to justify its zero price value. Once the network has been able to successfully capture meaningful mind share, the next big thing would be to harness the network for revenue opportunities in order to later add quality content and greater expanse … and the cycle would be a positively self-perpetuating cycle that would theoretically know no bounds.

All of the above is fine and dandy. To reiterate, this has been the traditional model and it has continued to be overtly championed so much so that a significant number of such networks still embrace this concept. But have we stepped back and reflected upon this thought that have crystallized as a de facto model over the last few years!
I think we have, and the market is responding accordingly. I am a firm believer in the market system, as I have been steeped in the traditional compositions of Hayek, Schumpeter, Mises and the Austrian school of thought: their thesis being that the price mechanism is the big leveler. Price is not simply that numerical tag on a good or service that I am just referring to: rather, it is the abstraction of the definition that has significantly huge relevance in the economics of social networks and long-term virality and sustainability. Price is the measure of value determined by the laws of demand and supply. It is the spontaneous emergence of value created across several ecosystems that one may be immediately or indirectly connected to … but no one could or would have enough information to gauge or for that matter guide the whole toward a directed end. The value that is imputed in the price quotient changes: that much is obvious! It is governed by what Keynes had called once – the animal spirits. That fact still holds true and these “spirits” can advance or collapse societies in short notice. So what are the implications, if you will, of this short diatribe of economic thought upon social networks and the urban myth of FREE?

Free is good. Yet, Milton Friedman harangued at that word – He said, “There is no such thing as a free lunch”. But we still believe that free is the price that is most acceptable to consumers, since it would create monetizable opportunities on pure volume. Freemium became the order of the day. Get the barbarians into the gate and then cross-sell and up-sell to your heart’s content. But all along that strain of logic, we have forgotten the Friedman adage – for indeed, the barbarians at the gate are paying a price – time, energy, their conversations, their rants and rave, their hopes, their dreams – all potential fodder in the “free” social network ecosystem. What we are doing is that our technologies are creating a petri dish for guinea pigs and the enablers are forcing themselves upon the sensibilities of these “barbarians”. The common thinking – We want them in but once in, we can then strafe their sensibilities with what we determine are contextual ads and offers and relevant value parameters that they would appreciate. But all of a sudden the market has caught on to that. The house is falling down with too many barbarians through the gate; and these “barbarians” care less and less. They become cliques and guilds in a closed environment; they become oblivious to the big brother; they revolt with their attention; they shut their minds, their hearts, and yes … they shut their wallets. Yet they are there for the simple price of being part of small but meaningful conversations … a psychological need to belong, a sense of loyalty to their immediate virtual neighbors. But the noise around is overwhelming and it drowns the tidbits of conversation … so a need emerges wherein there these folks will pay for silence. The conversations will continue; conversations which have the added value of cultural diversity fuelled by the dissolution of geographical boundaries … the conversations are weighed by meaning and gravitas; a modus operandi of respect and mutual understanding … it is my contention that people are willing to pay a price for the silence in order to avert white noise and create more meaning.

So now emerges the niche networks! They offer the insulation from irrelevance: people want to be relevant; they want their conversations to be heard. They would want to reduce it to fireside chats and they measure the meaning over sips of coffee. Information and conversations are balkanized; the quality is enhanced and generally uniformed but quality ensues. The patterns of conversation become the springboard for native monetization. So we will focus on natively monetizing the buzz between connections; we will inspect the patterns of exchange and giving; we will attribute a value and we believe that a small fee will do justice to the calculus of consent.

AS PART of an effort to streamline Economist.com and arrange things more logically, we’re closing down the Babbage blog. We’ll continue to post extra science and technology stories online, in addition to those that appear in the print edition, but these will now appear on the Science and technology page, rather than as posts on the Babbage blog. Our aim is t […]

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